Simplicity

Knowing Which Way the Wind Blows

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(Warning: This post relies on many of the talking points in a previous post on the economy, "Politics, Economics, and the American Church." It may help to read that post first.)

I'm a dedicated reader of The Wall Street Journal. It's been the newspaper of record for me for about six years now, about the only newspaper that's both written for thinking adults AND not given to populating its staff with people burdened with agendas (*cough* Gray Lady *cough*).

But lately, the economic reporting at the WSJ resembles a hundred people sticking their wet fingers in the wind, each with a unique perspective on its ultimate direction. In the aftermath of the holiday buying orgy, that's ominous.

Long-time readers know that I discuss economic issues here at Cerulean Sanctum regularly. And one of my regular types of posts is my warning that the Church in America is woefully prepared for an economic meltdown. I remember 1999-2004 very well, but it seems that few others do. That recession was only a warning shot across the bow. But just as 9/11 did nothing to swell the ranks of our church rolls, we American Christians appear to have learned nada from that last recession.

After the trouncing the Republicans received just months ago, leading conservatives scratched and scratched their heads, blaming the defeat on everything except the economy. In fact, they thought their trump card was the strength of the economy. Yet I noted that in close races Democrats who eked out wins over Republicans in states that went to Bush universally ran as economic isolationists. Another Great Depression?People voted for politicians they thought could protect their jobs, keep our trade deficit in check, and who understood that all this talk of free trade is little more than hot air at the expense of the guy just trying to keep his head above water.

If I was wrong on that assessment back in mid-November, Christmas buying would tell.

Well, I've been noting the retail misery index in recent weeks, and as I expected, retailers are calling Christmas 2006 a bust. Yes, online retailers did better than in previous years (I'll get into that in a second), and so did luxury retailers. Yet for just about everyone else, Santa brought a lump of coal. Discounters saw their traditional base grow even cheaper, while mid-level department stores are already claiming the St. Valentine Day Massacre got moved up to St. Nicholas Day.

As for the luxury retailers, those folks with salaries in the top one percent have enjoyed close to a 20 percent increase in earnings since 2004. Given that happy days are here again for the financial elite, should we be surprised they're snapping up the latest special-edition Swarovski chandeliers for their yachts?

But for the rest of us 99 percent, we're slumming at around a three percent rate of salary growth in the face of 50 percent increases in energy prices in some markets, not to mention still-atmospheric gas prices. Did anyone else notice that prices for petroleum-based plastic items this Christmas were up 15 to 30 percent?

Which explains to me why online retailers finally did well this year–better to shop online than blow a ton on gas money driving around shopping. But even that doesn't explain it all.

I've been shopping online since 1994. I suspect that puts me in that top one percent of online shoppers. This Christmas, I purchased almost nothing online. Why? The prices were worse than brick and mortar stores. In all my years of online shopping, I can't recall that being the case. Shipping prices were up (obviously), but so were online retail prices in general. In years past, the big guns like Amazon and Buy.com killed the B&Ms in price. Not this year. In fact, this year the little niche players online had it all over the big guys, yet it was the big guys claiming 2006 filled their coffers.

So yes, the gas situation drove some of that. I also think that this may have been the year when the reticent Internet shopper loss his reticence. But as for us, three Christmases ago our front porch looked like an Amazon loading dock. This year, I bought nothing from Amazon at all.

In fact, in our extended family, both sides cut back on spending. Three years ago, my son alone got $250 worth of gifts. This year, I spent less than that on the sum total of our gift giving—for the eighteen people on our list. And one side of our family is already asking to cut back even more for next year.

Like I said in this post, our economy is not in good shape and no one seems to get it. Or at least they didn't before the day after Christmas. 

Economists raved about the fabulous growth we had in 2006, though the actual percentage of growth has been repeatedly revised downward from 2.8 percent to 2.0 over the course of the year. A couple years ago, the same sources deemed Japan's 1.2 percent growth "miserable," yet here we are with our 2.0 percent growth in this astonishing period of blissful wealth. Last time I checked though, wealthy people didn't proclaim, "Hey, we need to spend even less money on Christmas."

Still, the economic news continued its wonderfulness all through December. However, the day after Christmas, the WSJ, the loudest of the wonderfulness trumpeters the last two years (even as its business pages told of company after company laying off employees, and its biz reporters wondered at the dearth of IPOs since 2004), announced that major economists predict another recession—soon.

Wow. A recession. From nowhere!  

Six years ago, the majority of families we knew were single-income. Now, virtually none of them are. Yet if you ask these now-double-incomers if they're better off financially, you'll get two sets of bared teeth and a collective growl.

What continues to bug me is that we Christians aren't doing anything to prepare for the economic bottom falling out of America. From what the car rags say, Ford and GM (who were smarting for certain last December even with their employee pricing ruse) sold a grand total of three cars between the two companies this December. And China's set to introduce its first car line in America. If China starts dumping cheap cars here, you can bet that it won't only kick Ford and GM in the shins, it will force every car company in the world to ramp up building plants in China in order to compete. That means they won't be building more here. Few of us understand how much of our shaky economy depends on car manufacturers. The Church sure doesn't.

The sum total of all the millions of sermons preached in America in 2006 probably didn't include a half dozen talking about how to prepare the Church and its people for dark economic days. We've got virtually nothing in place to help folks find work. We don't fight for economic justice for the poor. So when its the middle class asking, "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" who's going to fight for us?

Where are the Christian leaders out there who can talk on this issue of economics in America? Who works with big corporations to bring godly justice for overworked, underpaid people? Who's calling companies on the carpet for paying failed CEOs of large multinationals golden parachutes of a quarter billion dollars or more? Money doesn't grow on trees, so someone lost money out of his pocket so that some corporate failure could gild his lillies while he waits for the next board of suckers to come around. How much more are you paying in medical expenses this year while the CEO of United Healthcare walks off with a billion dollars?

I keep hoping that each year's going to be the one when we smarten up. I'm beginning to see that the best we Christians seem to be able to do on this issue is react—and too late at that.

What is it going to take for us to get wise?

Busting Myths About Christianity: Assessing Myths 4-6

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The other day, we looked at three myths that dog Christianity, particularly the form found in America. Today we'll examine three more.

The ten myths:

  1. Christians are more judgmental than non-Christians.
  2. Christians are stingier than non-Christians.
  3. Christians are more intolerant of other people than non-Christians.
  4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians. 
  5. Christians don't know how to have fun. 
  6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do.
  7. Christians prefer kitsch over important art.
  8. Christian subculture mimics the world rather than creating anything lasting.
  9. Companies run by Christians are as unethical as secular companies, and perhaps more so.
  10. Christianity causes more problems in the world than any other religion.

Let's look at numbers four through six…

4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians

You won't find a church with a Fifty Year Plan. Or a Twenty, for that matter. Long-range goals don't figure into much of what we do in American Christianity. In many way, we American Christians resemble a school full of amnesiacs, always learning, but never remembering the past well enough to build toward a future.

Somehow, we've allowed the first half of one passage to subsume the rest of Scripture: 

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"– yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
—James 4:13-14 ESV

While most of us would deem "Live for today for tomorrow you die," to be the ultimate self-centered expression of a culture hellbent on hedonism, we've somehow aligned it with the James passage. We get all dispensational and start talking how "it's all going to burn." Our lives take on "So what?" sheen.

That so many people who call themselves believers fall into this trap should bother us. But it doesn't.

Jesus said this:

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
—Matthew 6:19-21 ESV

We need to look at James in light of Jesus. The Lord tells us that our mist-like life here and now has eternal purpose that will carry over into the afterlife. Singer-Sargent "Hercules and the Hydra"It is one thing to live for the day, but quite another to live for the day so eternity is richer.

You don't hear enough sermons about storing up treasure in heaven. I hear plenty about living the good life now, yet the only correct way to understand "it's all going to burn" is not as an excuse to cover profligacy this side of heaven, but as the means of testing every man's and woman's work after we die.

Who can blame a non-Christian for going for the gusto now? He or she's got nothing else to look forward to. Some will move beyond the "live for the moment" lifestyle that plagues America, opting for the concept of a "legacy." Even that may be wishful thiking, hoping our typical three-month collective memory will somehow stretch out to a century or more.

But when a Christian adopts "grab all the gusto' as a personal motto? That's the most pathetic short-sightedness of all. Yet how much of modern Christianity in the United States lives by that mantra? Better that we all be poor wretches considered the scum of the earth by non-Christians than we build a Camelot now that will only succumb to moths and rust.

Are all Christians that short-sighted? No. But increasingly, our churches fill with folks looking for the good life stamped by the Holy Spirit's seal of approval. When our preaching says nothing of building a true legacy that we will actually play out in eternity based upon what we do now, our short-sightedness damns us to a future as the shoe-shine boys of heaven, buffing the sandals of saints who laid it all down, even unto death.

We know we have an eternal future. What is more short-sighted than living as if that doesn't matter?

Assessment: Confirmed

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5. Christians don't know how to have fun

When it comes to amusing ourselves to death, I think American Christians find as many ways to do it as non-Christians, albeit with fewer F-words and less full-frontal nudity.

We demanded, and seem to have received, more movies geared to Christians. And while the finished products haven't been all that spectacular, our craving for more will ensure they keep coming–with increasing regularity.

I plan on writing more about this topic in the near future, but in many ways, we Christians in the United States traded sanctification for entertainment. When God Himself no longer seems to excite us, we surround Him with our little cultural dog and pony shows, praying someone will pay attention. How else do we explain the entertainment complexes we used to call "churches." At one point in time, we went to see men on fire for God, but now preachers have to literally pour gasoline over themselves and light a match to get anyone to sit up and take notice.

Oddly enough, this fifth myth may be a remnant from the Seventies, before Christians got hip to their entertainment choices. I'm not sure non-Christians today hold the opinion that Christians don't have fun. That's been replaced with the concept that Christians don't really care about the life and death belief system they hold, practicing those beliefs more as a hobby than a way of life. If anything, it's the non-Christian who's grown more serious about life, while too many of us Christians worry that our new 60" TV still isn't big enough to show all the fine detail in the latest Left Behind video game we bought after reading the book and seeing the movie.

It's quite sad that in so many instances the one thing that separates us from non-Christians isn't the amount of entertainment we consume, but the randomly-sterilized nature of the entertainment we spend millions of dollars buying. Sure, their violent video game has swearing, but our violent video game doesn't.

If we think we're fooling God with that kind of subtlety, we're only fooling ourselves.

Assessment: Busted—perhaps too Busted

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6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do 

It would be safe to say that I don't personally know any Christian intellectuals. On the other hand, while I do not know any non-Christian intellectuals, either, I know a few who have convinced themselves they are. And as we all know, an audience that only consists of one's self is usually an easy audience to please.

First Things has a couple online articles covering Mark Noll's seminal book on this issue, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (found here and here). Dr. Noll researched that book during my tenure at Wheaton, and though I never took any classes from him, I had a few other profs I'd classify as intellectuals. Unfortunately, like most intellectuals, those profs congregated in very tight circles. The less intellectually rigid of us rarely encountered them "in the wild." And so it is today.

I knew an Old Testament scholar who attended the same church I once did. Sadly, that church never seriously appreciated the kind of study that scholar pursued. Though they trotted him out on occasion as a kind of "please take the witness stand, Doctor" expert, he eventually left the church. I suspect he tired of being a sort of intellectual freakshow amid people who'd rather be watching Fear Factor.

So whither the Christain intellectual? Do any still exist?

Say what we will about history, but it's loaded with Christians (and people who mentally assented to Christianity) who drove the arts, philosophy, literature, and science—and in large numbers.

But what happened to them all? Where did they go? Sure, you see a Plantinga here, and a…uh, hmm. I'm not coming up with any names for contemporary Christian lit authors. Artists? Nope—no one comes to mind. In fact, I suspect that most Christians, even if their lives depended on it, couldn't name one contemporary Christian intellectual or artist.

Are we so bereft today that all we can remember are those great Christian intellectual luminaries of the past? Christianity nurtured Western civilization into being, yet in the 21st century we Christians gave it all away.

Perhaps we missed the point of this verse:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
—1 Corinthians 1:20 ESV

Rather than understanding that cleverly invented myths from the world's wisemen don't trump the eternal truth of God correctly handled God's wise men, we threw all the wisemen—and their wisdom, no matter the source–out.

That this ignores most of the rest of Scripture, and also makes a fine distorted case for tearing all the wisdom books out of the Bible, eludes far too many people. In the end, Christianity never calls anyone to turn off his mind. To insist it does only results in the kind of brain-dead emotionalism that leads to error. Hoisting godly wisdom by it own petard makes the Church look vacant in the cranium.

While the non-Christian may ignore the intellectuals, I suspect precious few of them are hauling out treatises to discredit the life of the mind. We Christians of the 21st century, unlike our predecessors of long ago, seem to be the ones intent on slaying the intellect.

If the few Christian intellects left decry the problem, perhaps there's some truth to the rumor. But then, we don't listen to anything they say anyway.

Assessment: Confirmed

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More myth assessments in days ahead…

Entries in this series:

 

{Image: Hercules and the Hydra by John Singer-Sargent — Simply awesome.} 

Staples of Christmastime: Peace

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 Thou dost keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee because he trusts in Thee. —Isaiah 26:3 (RSV) 

I don't do a lot of personal revelation here at Cerulean Sanctum. For the benefit of those people who grapple with the whole idea of "Peace on Earth," I thought I'd share a few things. CandleLast year, I wrote on peace, but wanted to revisit the issue since I struggle with inner peace more than most people, I suspect.  In trying to nail all the things down that I must do before Christmas, deal with the fallout from last week, and just get my head right in this season of the Coming King, peace fled away faster than a rocket-powered sleigh.

I start by noting this is the second time I've written this post. It started out paired with the post on Prosperity, then I realized I needed to split it. So I duplicated the tab in Firefox, giving me two copies of the post. I deleted the Peace from the Prosperity and the Prosperity from the Peace and saved both. the Peace section first. Sadly, in doing so, WordPress could not distinguish the post IDs from each other, so in saving the Prosperity second, I said goodbye to the Peace post. Evidently, duplicating the tab was clever, but stupid at the same time. Lesson learned. A perfect metaphor for peace—or the lack of it—we find at Christmastime. Say goodbye to all that work and do it again.

So much for clearing the To-Do list.

A couple weeks ago, I went to bed at 2:45 AM after a day of frenzy. A half hour later, my head still buzzed with things to do. Over the next hour after that, I would get up four times because I'd forgotten to

  1. Take out the trash
  2. Feed the rabbit
  3. Start the dishwasher
  4. Close the garage door.

If I don't attend to those little activities, who will? Let them slip and the next thing you know, Junior's weeping because Fluffy Bunny won't "wake up." So sleep becomes a precious commodity.

Someone should have informed the world at my birth that I'm not one for frantic activity. I have a tendency amid busyness to stand in the center of a room and wonder why I'm there. I know I came in for something, but what? The older I get, the less I seem capable of handling the fast-paced American lifestyle we're each called to live. I don't think God intends us to live like headless chickens, but what's a headless chicken to do?

Knowing Christ dealt with my sin certainly gives peace. I think that's the peace the Bible speaks of when it talks about peace. The passage that begins this post is from the RSV because it's the version I memorized long ago. Despite knowing that verse backwards and forwards, peace still seems elusive in an age when machines scream at you to attend them. A couple weeks ago, my Palm PDA, the phone, and the beep of an incoming e-mail on my computer all went off in a fury of audible technical alerts at precisely the same moment. My scalp still hurts from ramming my head through the tiny plaster points of our textured ceiling, such was the altitude I achieved.

Peace. What is peace?

It's not just busyness that kills peace. I'm not a good one for the type of decision-making peace my wife comes by so easily. When an enormous, forever-life-altering decision must be reached, she determines the correct direction by peace. You may have heard it before, that "I felt peace about it" thing that so many utter when assured that God's delivered unto them the one perfect choice. Hours spent searching the Scriptures for some evidence that the saints of old justified their choices by the amount of peace they felt in making a decision came to naught for me. To this day, I don't think I've ever felt that kind of peace when making any of the major decisions I've confronted in life. That nagging feeling I wasn't doing the right thing never left.

I've seen a lot of people who made a decision at eighteen and decades later were still wilting like some sun-starved petunia under the shadow of that choice. Good people. Christian people. People who wrestle every day with a lack of peace because they don't want to add shadow upon shadow. It's one thing to quote them Romans 8:28 and something altogether different to stand by them until the shadow flees in the bright light of the Son. The latter reflects the heart of God, but how rare it is to find among people beset by too many e-mails, crying babies, and a Charles Schwab account manager on line one begging you to sell now or kiss your retirement goodbye.

Someone's got to take the blame when a decision goes awry, right? Not being one of those "get mad at God" types who likes to shake his fist at the heavens (where I come from, that's called "rebellion"), I tend to fall back on blaming myself for not scrying God's Master Plan for the Universe more thoroughly. I keep hoping that one day someone tries to hawk the Urim and Thummim on eBay. THOSE I'd bid on. You can keep the rest.

And so, dear reader, I ask: what is peace? And how does one find real rest for one's soul in the middle of lives kicked into overdrive?

In this season of peace, when you can still get away with sending a Christmas card festooned with an olive-branch-bearing white dove and not be blamed for offending someone else's beliefs (or lack of them), the answer to that question may be the best gift we can hope for under our trees.